Tag: Wild-systems

Remember the time when your best friend was still a human? Soon we might have this kind of conversations with each other, since Replika, your first AI friend is here. Replika is 100% AI chatbot that you “raise” by chatting with him/her. Replika learns your personality traits and mimics your behavior, while keeping your memories and helping you to get more connected with yourself.

What is your digital footprint? Facebook knows it. Developers Regina Flores Mir and Hang Do Thi Duc created a new Chrome extension called the Data Selfie. The Data Selfie is an application developed to quantify your digital footprint is by looking at your media and social networks consumption. Every ‘like’ and ‘click’ on Facebook tells a story about you. Even the articles you read and where they come from.

Welcome to the future of self-flying taxi drones, as if self-driving cars weren’t good enough. Chinese drone developer EHang will launch its first passenger-carrying drones this summer in Dubai, which is striving to become the world’s first city to allow such vehicles.

Data became so omnipresent that we need to protect from it. Designer Leanne Wijnsma has developed a scent dispenser to alarm us when we visit a malleable website through the sense of smell. Tomorrow, February 18, you can learn more about this technology during The Smell of Data Workshop at the NieuweVide in Haarlem. The event will start at 13:00 with a talk on how we deal with the Internet and data in relation to our instincts, and will continue with each participant developing their own scent or sound for the Internet, based on behaviors from the animal and plant world. More info: Nieuwe Vide

Beating your robot might get you in real trouble with legal authorities in the near future. Recently the European Parliament discussed the introduction of an “electronic personhood” for robots. As personhood describes the status of being an actual person, this decision raises big questions about equality, citizenship, legal and ironically, human rights for artificial intelligent machines.

Drones are becoming an integral part of our life. In the future they might control the weather, supply medicines, or maybe even become our best friends. Until that moment, we should consider developing drone regulations for our own safety. Researchers at Virginia Tech are studying the risk of injury caused by drone collision using a crash test dummy.

Rain radars help us plan our everyday life and foresee natural disasters. In a world were the line between the technosphere and the biosphere becomes blurrier everyday, not even our meteorology instruments can tell the difference, like a local technician spotted in New Zealand’s official weather forecasts site. Apparently there is a WiFi network illegally configured that interferes with the rain radar creating a ray of “clouds” that won’t bring any water, but it surely became our peculiar image of the week.

The natural habitat of the polar bear is the Arctic. The natural habitat of the scorpion is the desert. How about humans? What is our natural habitat? And what does it mean to live in a next nature? Discover it with the Next Nature Habitat VR, our immersive experience to travel through different environments where we might live in someday. Will machines take over, just like they did with the Internet or global finance? Or will we go back to live like our ancestors, in close harmony with nature and gathering food to survive? And what if we existed in a fully simulated reality, could we endure such a artificial place? Try to answer these questions and join the discussion on our possible future habitat. Step inside…